Charm meson production from meson-nucleon scattering

Using an effective hadronic Lagrangian with physical hadron masses and coupling constants determined either empirically or from SU(4) flavor symmetry, we study the production cross sections of charm mesons from pion and rho meson interactions with nucleons. With a cutoff parameter of 1 GeV at interaction vertices as usually used in studying the cross sections for $J/\psi$ absorption and charm meson scattering by hadrons, we find that the cross sections for charm meson production have values of a few tenth of mb and are dominated by the s channel nucleon pole diagram. Relevance of these reactions to charm meson production in relativistic heavy ion collisions is discussed.